What’s wrong with this picture? It always surprises me when major sites with huge traffic and stable of full-time developers have features that are fundamentally broken. Check out this screenshot from Bizrate.com (click picture to see full sized image)

How many characters left?

What’s wrong?

1. It only gives me 255 characters. This is probably because they have chosen to store the text in a fixed-length database field for rapid retrieval. That’s what happens when the usability people and the marketing people get overrruled by some engineer who thinks that this minor efficiency improvement is sufficient reason to cripple the interface.
2. It doesn’t tell me anywhere how many characters I’m allowed. It wasn’t until I submitted my original version that it rejected it and came back and told me there was a 255 character limit.
3. It has no running count of characters used. This has become a standard feature everywhere else. We’re used to it on Twitter and most places that have low character limitations.

So what? Well, it took me three tries to get my feedback accepted. And by the time I did, the glowing testimonial I had for the merchant was gone. No room left.

All the merchant got out of this was my comment that I think they should make their free shipping offer appear more prominently on the page.

What the merchant did not get was my comment that when I factored in free shipping, their price was significantly better than the competitor’s price.

Okay, I just placed the order, so I can’t comment on speed of delivery and all that, but I would say that the shopping experience on US-Mattress.com was close to ideal. It’s easy to navigate, there are no real surprises (except why did they offer to let me upgrade to “standard front door” delivery for $49? What is the delivery I’m getting for free?).

Anyway, the bad part is that I agreed to do the Bizrate survey because I like to reward e-commerce merchants who do it “right”. I arrived at the survey with a good feeling, wanting to leave a great testimonial. But the frustrations of using Bizrate’s system left me feeling, well… frustrated. Of course, I don’t hold US-Mattress responsible, at least not consciously, but that’s the thing about usability problems — often they operate on a sub-conscious level. The good feeling I had upon completing the purchase is now forever associated with the stupid Bizrate survey.

And then, there’s Bizrate’s enticements to get you to take the survey, promising all sorts of free stuff. Obviously, everyone who spends a lot of time on the net knows by now that these are not “rewards”, but affiliate offers from which Bizrate makes additional income, but that’s a whole other story.

No, that title isn’t a typo. It’s a sarcastic comment on the “genius” of the login screen for the iTunes Genius feature which, as it turns out, is the same as the iTunes store login. It took me four tries to figure out how to log in. Not so Genius. Read on » »

I would say the thing that drives me nuts the most about Gmail, is the fact that every time you delete a message, you’re kicked back out to the message list. Google, taking a page from Microsoft, has decided to do your thinking for you and take this option off the table because you really shouldn’t delete emails. But if I know I will never want that message again, I delete it. And am stuck back out at the message list. This, more than anything has stopped me from adopting Gmail.

It turns out there is a ‘Delete’ and go to next conversation Greasemonkey script that will do just what I’m looking for, but recent Gmail upgrades broke that script. So out of luck again. [Update, June 22, 2009: this script has been fixed. Check it out.]

Over at JimsTips.com, Jim suggests using Gmail Keyboard shortcuts (Gmail Help article) deleting with the # key, which does kick you back to the message list and then using the ‘k’ key to move to the next message and the ‘o’ or <enter> key to open the message. The thing I dislike about that is that it is three page loads when it should be two (in other words, why do I have to see that damn message list?).

So my similarly kludgey, but somewhat more elegant solution (or maybe not) is to:

• Turn on keyboard shortcuts (in Settings -> General).
• Create a label named ‘Delete’ (or ‘aaDelete’ if you want to be sure it is at the top of your label list).
• When reading a message, type ‘l’ (that’s a lower-case L) to bring up the label list.
• Hit the downarrow key once to select my top aaDelete label at the top of my list
• Hit the ‘k’ key to move to the next message.
• When I’m all done, I can view the messages deleted aaDelete and select and delete them all.

Yeah, stupid, crappy, cumbersome way to do it. I know. Tell Google.

Now if only they would come up with a proper way to view all unlabeled messages, but my solution to that is reasonably workable, if a bit cumbersome.

By default Firefox comes with a popup blocker enabled that prevents popups from automatically opening, that is the ones that you don’t specifically request, but that open just because you visit a page. So that’s fine. That problem is solved. What is more annoying is legitimate popups that are actually useful, but which are very unfriendly. Heres how to tame them in Firefox. Fix popup annoyances in Firefox. Read the simple solution» »